Hi Sven,
Although your points about the future of IPv4 is not under debate, IPv4 will be here for the next 2 years.
And that is also what the topic is about, a charging scheme for 2012, providing a re-presentable way of charging for a LIR membership.
What I read in the discussion is that we are looking for a way that is easy to understand and provides a way to cover the services provided by RIPE NCC and preferred in a way that is representation by the time used by a LIR to the resources used from RIPE. (human and/or IP resources).
Stating that managing a database shouldn't cost X when running it for 7750 LIR's doesn't cut it, as RIPE NCC does much more than most of us use or see.
Think about organizing the LIR trainings, IPv6 trainings, RIPE meetings, attending IETF or other RIR meetings, development of statistical information systems about Internet Health, the usage of BGP or prefixes etc.
One could argue if some of those should be paid in another way than the current membership fees, however each of them are agreed upon by the members that actually attend the RIPE meetings in the RIPE NCC Activity Plan.
So the big question for me atm is :
Would one like to see a fee structure (for 2012) based on a simple budget (roughly 17.5 milj. Euro ) for 2012 divided by $number_of_members ( 7745 ) or are we going to look into current actual usage of resources. The easiest thing is to charge every member 2250 Euro yearly and be done with this whole discussion.
Yes some LIR members don't have any interaction with RIPE or their provided services and having a single membership fee (not looking at used resources) might be more expensive for some (specifically smaller LIR's and new entrants.), but dealing with a creative fee structure also costs money.
If you would look closer into the actual financial statement you would get a pretty good idea which services are provided and what the overall cost is.
For instance, the cost of RIPE LIR trainings should be covered by the setup of a new LIR imho (and maxed to 2 free seats). Currently there is no additional charge for extra seats or re-visiting of a training. I personally think that training should not be free as free doesn't give the perception of value. Free doesn't work IMHO.
To give an idea, the current budget for 2011 for training services is 383.000 Euro. The training department (I know quite a lot of them personally and love them all to bits) does a hell of a job, flying all over the region, creating the content AND delivering the content (spreading the word ..) but if a LIR has a high change rate of their people, they could just send people each time, with no extra cost. Define fair to me please ...
The yearly cost for the RIPE meetings is about 850k Euro. The actual income for RIPE meetings is about 250k Euro, a loss per year of 600k Euro. Yes, even if you don't attend the RIPE meeting, your membership fee still pays 80 euro per LIR per year to cover the cost. The big question might be, should the RIPE membership fee pay to cover the RIPE meetings as it is not exclusive for RIPE members. If the answer yes, in that case one should also not complain that cost are made for things they don't use and that it is not fair that others have more IP's than they have and that they need to pay roughly 2250 euro yearly to cover all operating cost.
2250 euro yearly is 187,50 euro a month ... or 6.25 euro a day .. ( 6 euro 25 is roughly the same as I spend per day on smoking ... )
Regards,
Erik Bais

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